Faculty Retreat, January 16, 2011, Afternoon Panel Session

Transcription

1 Faculty Retreat, January 16, 2011, Afternoon Panel Session MICHAEL RIVAS: Moderator Okay I want you to know that we are really glad that you decided to stay here after lunch. I know many participants in our world that after they eat they would go hibernate or would find a place to let digestion occur but you were the brave and we're thankful that you're here for this session. Just to remind you, you have this in front of you in the program but this particular presentation is called Responding to Change: Visions of the Road Ahead. The intent or at least one of the intents of it is that this would then become a continuation of the discussion or the comments that were made by our president and then that were echoed or not--or responded to by three different perspectives. Then what we wanted to do is to have this presentation where we got a little closer to us by inviting people who are active participants, active members on this campus and what they do is they represent again a different slice of our community. So let me start by introducing our panel members. First we have from the Mike Curb College of Arts Media and Communication, Dean Robert Bucker. [Applause] Next to Robert, you have--or we have Dean Elizabeth Say from the College of Humanities. [Applause] And then we have somebody extra special (Cheryl Spector). Now what makes her extra special is about an hour ago, I walked up to her and said, "Cheryl, would you like to be on a committee--i mean on a panel?" And she said nothing. Kind of went like that. But then after a few minutes, she graciously volunteered to join us here. The reason is Michael Neubauer is sick today and so he wasn't able to join us. He lets us know this today and as soon as he did we started to look to see if we could find another one of our colleagues who would be able to add her expertise, her experience to the conversation and that's all we're asking her to do. This is- -You know, she's just had today to be thinking about this. Well, that's not true. She's been living it for a very long time. But to actually put---okay, not that long. But to actually put dots together to be able to present to you, she's just had a short time. And so we're gonna get the opportunity to hear from her as well. What we're gonna do is just go to each one and let them speak for as long as they want. We have-- We think we're gonna have some extra time here so they're gonna speak 15 minutes maybe. And then what we're gonna do is just have a dialogue amongst ourselves. You ask questions. You make comments. This is the place to do that. I want you to know that what we wanted to do is we were planning this session, is we were planning on you speaking, sharing your thoughts, your perspectives and maybe bouncing off your ideas off of your colleagues up here. I do want you to know that if things do get slow up here that I did bring my ipad and I have my words with friends open. And--No I'm not gonna be doing that, okay. But I was prepared but I know I'm not gonna need that. [3:35] So anyway, we're gonna get started now and--oh, I did have one announcement I was supposed to make. The sweatshirts that are in the back being sold, there are only two smalls and one medium left if you're interested. There are plenty of XXL for people of my dimension, but anyway--but there are only one medium and two smalls left so if you're interested. And with that aside, we'll get started. [4:05] ROBERT BUCKER: Great. As I prepared for today, I kind of smiled because a part of this presentation I think are the idea behind doing a presentation like this was very much heightened by the decision of the chancellor of the SUNY system to limit the Liberal Arts offerings at the State University of New York in Albany. I have kind of an interesting perspective on this particular case. The Chancellor of the SUNY system is Nancy Zimpher. She recruited me to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee the last position that was in before I moved here. The person who really set the tone at the State University of New York, Albany, before Nancy became the Chancellor of the system was a provost by the name of Carlos Santiago. Carlos followed Nancy Zimpher at the University of Wisconsin,

2 Milwaukee. Carlos is coming to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee was a significant reason for my listening to Harry Hellenbrand and Jolene Koester about moving to California State University, Northridge. [05:36] So what happened at the State University of New York, Albany had been in the Atmosphere for awhile and the story there--that's a huge university system, 64 campuses with a history of specialization on many of those campuses. This is a long tradition there. The action that I think happened recently there was set in motion about 10 years ago when IBM gave that campus a 100 million dollar grant to develop a new center in nanotechnology to support a 2.5 billion dollar fabrication plant a hundred miles down the road. [06:30] So the mission there of the institution about a decade ago suddenly changed to begin to develop a cadre of employees for this huge fabrication plant down the road. So I think in a certain respect, this particular case is an isolated one. Certainly, the chancellor of the State University of New York is a great advocate for the arts. After she left Wisconsin she went to the University of Cincinnati and served as president there before being recruited to the SUNY system. She comes out of education. She is one of the few presidents' last chancellors in higher education with an EDD. ` [07:19] So what happened there is I think kind of a continuation of a progression that's been happening in that particular system for a long, long time. That system has really some unique qualities that are very, very much related to the fact that there's a lot of specialization on different campuses. The Performing and Visual Arts campus is in Westchester County. The mandate when the State of University decided that they wanted to establish such a campus was that they couldn't be in New York City where it directly competed with the Juilliard School, the Manhattan school or Manna school. [08:06] So there's been a lot of trading, horse trading if you will, in that particular system for decades so that the public sector was not seen to compete with the private sector. There's also in that particular state a lot of confusion about what's public and what's private. Many of you know Cornell University is the land grant and it's a member of the Ivy League. So there are a whole number of things and motivations for making these kinds are really, really difficult decisions that took place in this particular campus. And I just wanted to share that with you. I don't see it is necessarily being a sign of the times or a reason for us to panic. It is about a continuing saga within that system of how to distribute resources around the state. [09:03] ELIZABETH SAY: I'm going to ask your indulgence. I, last week, had this bronchial thing that everybody seems to have right now. So if my voice kind of gives out on me I apologize. Some of you may know that my disciplinary area is religious study. So I'm going to begin with a proverb. It's an old Hindu proverb and this is a very, very rough translation. Every afternoon the priest of the temple would layout a food offering for the gods and every evening the tigers would come out of the jungle and eat the food offering and the priests did everything they could to stop the tigers stealing the offerings to the gods. And some of the priests were injured and some of the priests lost their life in trying to prevent the tigers from stealing the offerings. In the end the priest decided to incorporate. In the end the priest decided to incorporate the tigers coming in to the temple into the ritual. And so now every evening, as part of the ritual, the priest layout the offerings, the tigers come and steal it. And it's all part of the ongoing ritual. [10:24]

3 The moral of the story is things change, either we adapt or we perish. And I think that's part of what we're looking at right now and there's a lot of concern, particularly, among those of us in the liberal arts and sciences, about what change might mean and how it might affect us. Bob was just talking about what happened at Albany. But Albany is not the only place where in particular languages seem to be under attack and other disciplines in the humanity seem to be kinda held up as--if we have budget crisis, the first thing we should cut is the humanities because after all they're sort of irrelevant and we don't really need them, not the way we need, you know, stem disciplines or the hard sciences or business or something like that. And so there had been--in the Chronicle, there have been headlines such as "Can the Humanity Survive the 21st Century, Budget-Cutting Colleges Bid Some Languages Adieu, Disappearing Languages in Albany," and they seem to be the easiest thing to cut. [11:39] However, I want to read you a short statement from one professor who had the following observation to make and this is actually a biochemist who came to the defense of the humanities. He observed that "A university without the liberal arts and sciences is not a university, it's a trade school." And I think that I would like to echo that sentiment. He went on to say, "The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained." [12:28] One of the things I think that is fortunate for those of us here at Cal State, Northridge and I've been here a long time, I was an undergraduate here back in the '70s and I've been here since 1986 as a faculty member, is that this is a campus where we don't have upper administration who thinks that the way to solve everything is to slash the arts and sciences and turn us into a trade school. And I'd be happy to talk about some of the things that we're doing in the College of Humanity to continue to support languages and literature, the ethics studies programs, and all these things that I think help lead to broadly trained interdisciplinary thinkers and scholars. But I'll say that and let Cheryl go ahead and weigh in here and then I'd be happy to be more specific if you'd like to hear some of those things. [13:25] CHERLY SPECTOR: Well, I arrived here as Dr. Spector in the English Department as was glad to be there and loved my work, but as years went on, I had one of those career morphing paths that has put me where I am now as the Director of Academic First Year Experiences. I value the arts and the humanities beyond measure, still, even though I'm not teaching them at this time. I think you can see evidence that I value certainly my own first discipline in the Freshmen Common Reading Program. That is something I started here and it's now coming in to its 5th year starting in the fall. We've just picked a book and we're moving ahead. It seems to me that--you know, I was interested in the headline Beth quoted shortly ago, Can the Humanity Survive the 21st--Can this Humanity Survived the 21st Century? I think it's more--the question might more reasonably asked, Can the 21st Century Survive without the Arts and the Humanities? Because that's where we engage our students most often. [14:52] There are very few, particularly pupils, let's say, in K12 who just have a natural affinity for a love of math or physics or engineering. They don't even get to do some of those things until very late in their careers. I think the arts and the humanities are good in themselves but they're also good as a way of helping our students appreciate the wide and importantly wide range of disciplines that the university offers. I don't think any of us would look forward to reducing Cal State, Northridge, to just a trade school, just a means to an end, as one of our university 100 freshmen readings says. The university is good in itself. [15:42]

4 It is its own--it has its own values that students benefit from enormously. So if I take the question posed in the program literally which is certainly what I've done having no time to become figurative about it, I would say, "Well, of course, the liberal arts are still valid in the new socioeconomic landscape and in fact, more important that they ever were. In a world of luxury, who needed more luxuries but arts and humanities are maybe the only luxuries we have left and we can't afford to let them go." [16:25] RIVAS: Okay. Let's go ahead and open it up to see if we have any questions. I think Beth let you know that she has some specifics that she would be willing to share. But let's see if there's something you have in mind that you wanna address in particular. Michael again is gonna be our gracious volunteer of bringing the mic around to you. [16:50] [17:14] GREG: Thanks. My name is Greg. I'm in College of Education in Elementary Ed. My question references to something that Beth said but it certainly applies to all three of you. I'm wondering how in this economic environment, Beth suggested that we educate people who are not too narrowly trained. But in this economic environment, don't you think that many, many students seeking a college education think that it's getting them on a specific path to a specific end? And I guess in our worlds as educators, both specifically as well as generally as part of a system, how do we make ourselves marketable and how do we kind of reshape education to say education for education's sake as well as getting on that path to a career? That's it. [18:01] SAY: So as I understand your question, is how do we get students to appreciate the idea of education for education's sake? It's a tough sell, I think, in this day and age. Here we--things have become pretty instrumentalist. The notion that--and I think, actually, our provost has spoken about this, the notion that education is a social good as opposed to a private good, I think is--has become a harder sell because everything is telling us that education is a kind of a private good that you get, it benefits you, it benefits you because you make more money, et cetera, et cetera, and we don't talk about how it benefits the social fabric as a whole. And I think that that's a conversation that needs to be--we need to be having more publicly as a university why education is good for society and why it makes it the kind of place we all wanna live. [19:08] And to get students to understand that, I think, it's difficult. But I also think that there are some great spokespersons, you know, advocates for it, like, you know, this biochemist who is willing to say, you know, without a broad education it doesn't matter if you have your degree in biochemistry, if you don't have that broad foundation, you really are--you don't serve--you're not able to serve your discipline in your field as well. And there are--you know, if you look at folks--i wish I could remember this now. I was just reading an article about leaders of Fortune 500 companies and you look at where their degrees are, something like half of them have their degrees in the arts and sciences. They didn't get their degrees in business. They didn't get their degree in their specific field of endeavor. [20:03] They got their degree in the arts and sciences which enabled them to think broadly, go out into the world, see--you know, bring their ideas to the world and to their own fields and really build something that was useful and functional. So the idea that somehow those of us who study, you know, humanities or the arts and sciences are just kind of--you know, that we don't bring anything useful to the world, that somehow knowing languages or knowing literature is just kind of a luxury, I think is we have a role in changing public perception in that and so far as that's concerned. [20:46]

5 SPECTOR: And I would add that one place where we certainly ought to be making that clear to our students would be in all of our general education courses which have on occasion been peripheralized or trivialized or that's the course you give up first if you get a grant. Not everybody is that way. It's fun to teach GE classes to me because you get the opportunity to--you know, it's often the one chance you get to reach someone who believes he or she is heading in a completely different direction and it gives you a daily, oh, a test, to see if you can effectively articulate what it is you love about and value in this discipline that is your academic home. So now, it was news to me about 10 years into my CSUN career that I actually had to explain to my GE students what this course was and how it fit into their education. But I learned the news, I took it in, and I began to do that and that makes an enormous difference. I think it helps students reflect by equipping them with things that we deeply believe in and have thought about a lot. [22:00] BUCKER: Yeah, I also think it's important that we have an awful lot of students here and just a lot of students go to college in general right now to get a job. They're thinking in terms of I wanna come out of CSUN and I wanna be able to get this job. That's a really, really different kind of thinking than the kind of thinking that land someone as the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. That's a person that's much more likely comfortable and has come out of a community of ideas and not thinking just the specifics but thinking of a lot of different perspectives, maybe having ideas of their own and appreciating really good ideas from others when they hear them. And I would argue that those skills are taught very, very firmly in the liberal arts curriculum. But the other thing about that group of ladies and gentlemen is to look at those institutions that they've graduated from and they're almost all going to be strong liberal arts based institutions. [23:28] CAROL SHUBIN: Yeah, I just wanted to talk about European universities 'cause they have a sort of different system than the American universities in general that people go to college and they specialize in math or whatever field. And they sort of assume that you've gotten your general ed before that and by the time you're in college, now, you're ready to focus. Now, it's true that Google and Apple and Amazon are American companies so maybe certain visionary thinking comes from that type of educational system but it's not as though Europe is dead. So I just sort of wanted to maybe see if you could possibly sort of compare the systems and--or does it change it when you--when you look at European system, do you feel that they suffer from possible problem of not having liberal arts education? [24:41] SAY: I wanna be the one to say I'm not an expert on the European system. So I don't wanna try and make pronouncements about it. I really don't feel qualified to respond to that. I don't know. SPECTOR: You know, I haven't read much at all about that. You know, I've followed the general discussions of the European degrees and the three-year university trajectory, and now you've heard the two things I think I know on that subject. But what I do know from my years of experience with University 100 which means students who are 17 and 18 and with my own twins, one now a sophomore because she was quite ready for college when she graduated from high school and the other a freshman 'cause she was--she even--she, it was her idea. Can I take a year off? I don't think I'm ready for college, you know, and there was cheering for days in our house, you know. I think, clearly, you can't say Europe is educationally broken. I don't we're educationally broken. Of course, both approaches to education can do--can improve, but it's also true. This is where I'm heading. I have a point. That at 18 a student making the decision to take the path irrevocably has missed untold opportunities and I highly

6 recommend personal inspection. I think somebody talked about that this morning. You can do that in your personal life or you can do that in your academic life, what you wanted, and what you knew at 18 when you started that--if you were starting your freshman year at that time versus who you became even during that first year as you began to become who you are now. [26:39] There's a real lost in a focusing that comes too quickly. On the one hand, I enormously admire what undergraduate studies here have done. We were talking about it at lunch a little depth to make sure that students don't graduate on the 200 unit plan here. We are perforce limiting how many units students can take before they get out of here. But on the other hand, as I think, Teresa was saying in the panel this morning, you foreclose a certain amount of curiosity. You know, the things I took in my first two years of college is--you know, it was just wonderful. It was a luxury. If it's no longer unaffordable luxury, that is so sad. I worry that we're losing something and I would worry by the same token even more so if we shifted to a higher education plan that had us make students choose the trajectory so quickly and early. [27:42] RIVAS: I can give you just a brief glimpse of--in Switzerland I was there for a summer and so I went to one of the schools to see what they did, just most--more on a fact finding 'cause I had heard some things. And as it was explained to me in Luzon, this particular school, as they told the story, it was in around 6th grade. We would call 6th grade that students are tested and during that time they are then tracked into where they are going to go. The ability to switch tracks can't--it is there but it's very difficult to do and they said that it doesn't happen very often. But they can switch tracks and so one track is going to the university, another track is kind of a middle ground where it isn't quite certain and it would depend on their performance and so forth. And then the third track is the trade, basically profession, and that's done as early as, you know, what we would say 6th grade. So they're 12 years old or so. And, again, there were a lot of discussion even as this administrator was explaining to me on the value of that type of system but that was the system that was in place. And so, Carol, I don't know if that adds to, you know, what you were trying to say but that's--i don't think that's uncommon in the European system. I wanted to add that. [29:12] BUCKER: Yeah, probably the most interesting anecdote, I just learned of, actually, over the break. I have friends in Germany, the wife is professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and her husband is a visual artist. They're both visual artists. And their 19-year-old daughter is in her second year of medical training. I mean, in Germany they don't have premed. They just go right in. I want to be a doctor and they start right through. And, you know, that young woman, the 19-year-old who's in medical school now, has had a very, very different kind of upbringing. [30:00] The environment that has surrounded her, the environment in the home is a very, very different environment than the environment that most of our youngsters come from here at CSUN. So you know, is it a good thing, bad thing? It's just--it's a product of a culture decades, hundreds of years, in fact, of decision making that has led to this kind of a pathway that they carved for young person to make the decision at 6th grade and then by the time they go in Germany into high school, they go in to either a trade high school or a high school for this young woman to go to medical school. And it's their system and it's dramatically different. Basically, that young woman is studying to be a doctor for zero tuition, you know. They're paying for it in other ways. They have figured out culturally how to pay for higher education and for all kinds of professional training in different ways. But it is--it's such a dramatically

7 different structure that we have. It's really hard to compare. [31:15] UNKNOWN FACULTY: I recently had a conversation with a high school instructor here and he was-- has been fighting to keep a couple classes in high school, health and life skills, and just continually he has to fight administration to try to keep that. And then we also know--i have friends and family members who are in--teaching in grammar school in a high school and trying to keep the arts programs there and some of the other. And it feels to me that, you know, this conversation has already--there's already been decisions that they're making before the students even come here and I'm looking for comment on that. [32:05] BUCKER: I just would have to agree with you particularly in this region. There's no question that those--i'm a former high school chorale director in the Midwest. That's where my career started. And, you know, there are still programs there that are not threatened on a yearly basis. But where those programs had been gone for a long, long time now in some schools, it's very, very hard to reverse that momentum. And I'm constantly speaking with our current students and we have some very, very talented students here. But the world that they're gonna be competing in is a world with students from the Juilliard School from Oberlin, from places, where the youngsters there as freshmen are at a very, very different place than our students are at when they're seniors. So pursuing a career in some of those fields, particularly in the performing arts fields, it's really, really important that our students understand how they have been handicapped. I will be the last person in the world to tell them that it's not possible to overcome that, but you're absolutely right. The die was cast several decades ago now in the environment that they're coming out of. And I would argue that if we're in a defense mode about the liberal arts, it's the trickle up--it's the trickle up that's finally gotten to higher education. [34:09] RIVAS: As we get ready to move the microphone to some other folks, I wanted to mention something. I view this discussion about--you know, and it started with the president and then Barbara mentioned it later on about this idea of workforce needs versus being well rounded. I call that a healthy tension. And I think that most things when you look at two sides of the coin that there needs to be a healthy tension and that's kind of what keeps each one from going kind of off to the extreme. So in our discussion right now, I think it'd be good to hear a healthy tension there. In other words, the tension between this idea of--and Cheryl you mentioned and we don't wanna use that word, but the idea of luxury, luxury to be taking these classes versus this idea of getting the job and the workforce needs. And so I think it's okay. And I was hoping that our discussion would move in a way that where we challenge some of the things we do in order to do those things better, in order--maybe it's the message that we share. Maybe it's how we share that message, but that we have that type of dialogue amongst ourselves so that when we're asked these questions by the legislature or anybody else who is a power broker in this that we have a message to share with them as opposed to the message coming from them down to us. So anyway, I hope as we continue this for the next, you know, 30 minutes or so that thinking about those things, challenging the ideas, challenging the way that we've done things, coming up with other ideas. You know, I hope that that will come out of our discussion as well. [35:59] OWEN DOONAN: Hi, Owen Doonan from the Art Department. I just wanted to add a little bit different perspective to the discussion on the liberal arts model versus the European model of education. And I have many years of experience teaching in public and private universities in the Middle East where in many countries in the Middle East is very dynamic emerging economy and diversifying economy. And there's a great movement afoot in many countries to create private universities that are

8 really taking the lead in creating a new sense of education. And by far, that predominant mode of education in these emerging universities is the liberal arts model. And I think that's a very interesting to see in context where people are actively making a new university landscape almost that the liberal arts model is seen as the great strength of the American system rather than really going all gung-ho for a very narrow research approach. [37:24] SPECTOR: I'm struggling in part with the acoustics in the room, but if I understood what I--where I wanna go is to suggest that maybe that it's not such a healthy tension between workplace, demands, and the university demands. That shouldn't be a tension. Everyone should understand that if you want to work to be done well, then you want someone who knows a lot of different things knowing just one thing at a time or just a very small or narrow set of things. It guarantees that you as the worker are going to have a very hard time being anything but a worker bee. Now, there are corporate interests that would like nothing better than specialized lock step worker bees that feed the queen or the children of the rich to sort of mess with the metaphor of the bee hive. But I don't think I social--that's not a social model. I am happy with and I would like to help workplaces understand that there are many advantages to truly well-educated and broadly-educated employees. [38:48] HARRY HELLENBRAND: Let me challenge just on couple of these things. Number 1, every international test that I've seen at the high school and college level shows that our students do worse than European cities in history, in mathematics, in literature, in literacy, in science, and every possible field imaginable. So I don't know what evidence we have that our system is actually working well. Second piece of this is that--let me just stop there for 1 second, just stay with that piece and then I'll give you the second piece afterwards. Do you have any comments on that? SPECTOR: Somebody is gonna have to repeat it for me cause the feed-- HELLENBRAND: Well. SPECTOR: The room is so alive. I can't hear. HELLENBRAND: I'm sorry. I'll try one more time. When you take a look at the international tests that our there, the piece of test, all of these other sorts of things at every possible level, our students in history, in literature, in science, in mathematics, in technology perform less well on these examinations than European students. So I don't see what the indication is that our system is working better than their system by any means. [39:59] SPECTOR: Can you--did you hear him well enough to rephrase? SAY: There's no evidence our students are better than European students by any measure. SPECTOR: Okay. [ Laughter ] RIVAS: Elizabeth, say that again.

9 SAY: As I understand it, what the provost said is that there's really no evidence by any measure that our students are superior to European students in anything that they do whether it's history or language, or music or anything else, so that our students are--that our system is working better than the European system. [40:34] RIVAS: Harry [phonetic] is that what you were saying? HELLENBRAND: Yeah, pretty much and I'll give you part 2--part 2 to it which is we assume that we have liberal arts curriculum, but I see no evidence that we have that. What we have is a general education curriculum and that's a wholly different model. There's no indication that I can find in any curriculum being offered in public higher education in the United States that are making a concerted effort to teach liberal arts skills across the elementary disciplines and the introduction of those first few years. So both on the quantifiable evidence of student performance, and then on our own experience of what we teach, I find no evidence that the liberal arts curriculum that we teach is producing the effects that we want nor do I think you're producing--you're teaching the curriculum that we think we are teaching. So I'm just saying this to be obnoxiously challenging and to get to the great mood. [41:21] [ Laughter ] SPECTOR: Can you hear anything? Sorry. SAY: I just think that it's become pretty obvious that how--this--i think in a way this is kind of false dichotomy. Either we get rid of the liberal arts so that we can educate people and things that really matter or we hang on to the liberal arts and we say that these other things aren't important and I don't think--i think that's kind of a false dichotomy that get set up in some of these articles that have appeared in different publications recently. [41:55] You know, it's interesting to me, for example, that what often takes a hit when they wanna--when cuts are made is that--it's the languages and I'm looking at some of our language faculty over here and the idea that somehow, well, we'll cut the languages because that's irrelevant. We don't really need students to study languages. And yet, one of the things we learned with 9/11 was that we don't have people who understand culture, understand language who could really assist in understanding and deciphering what had gone on. [42:33] And when you have some--i think the number was something like 35 people in the whole CIA who spoke any Middle Eastern language or who could read it or understand it, and we've got a world crisis going on. There's a real problem there. So with--you know, things like languages continue to be important but we may need to think about how and why we teach them and how we deliver these to make them meaningful to our students, and I know our language programs have worked on that. It doesn't mean that we're gonna get rid of all of the romance languages in favor or teaching what are now being called strategic languages. But we are teaching new different languages that we hadn't talked before. We are teaching some of these new strategic languages. We're working with a CSU system wide initiative called the "strategic language initiative" to make these languages available to our students. And some of the other--the more traditional languages, we've changed the way we format it so we don't-- now, we don't have perhaps a department of German and a department of this, a department of that, but what the department has created is languages and culture major in which students can focus on a specific

10 language but where there's a lot of common courses where they do cultural comparative studies. So that we can continue to teach these languages but do it in a way that's more cost effective to you use that horrible term, but to make it workable and doable. So we're changing the way we teach them but it--i think sometimes we get this idea that either you have to get rid of languages to do what's really important or you hang on to languages and you become irrelevant, and I think that that's a kind of false dichotomy that get set up. [44:18] [ Pause ] [ Laughter ] SAY: Or not. [ Laughter ] BUCKER: Yes, yes. SAY: And I think that's true in the arts and it's true, you know, in literature and other things. [44:36] [ Pause ] KEN???: I actually was gonna make this comment earlier. The person who is talking about, you know, which program would you cut and so forth. I was in the public schools actually when Prop. 13 was initiated and I remember in a faculty meeting shortly thereafter, the German teacher--the German language teacher was saying, "Well, let's just cut visual art." And I looked at her like you've gotta be kidding. I didn't say anything then, but what happened at the end was that the languages were cut. Four languages were cut from that district. So I just wanna say my point was that I think we all have to stand together because once you start separating and saying I'm better than you or, you know, we should survive, we should have this one versus that one, then I think what happens is that we really fall apart and that we all lose. [45:30] BUCKER: Ken, I think there's a lot of evidence to the fact that first, for public school districts that did have the time, that had enough waffle room to do that, they learned that lesson very, very rapidly. And those that didn't in that first initial wave of cuts, it just kept going and going and going. KEN: Exactly. And I think we're in this post-13 wave just like what you were saying Bob and I think it's sort of like--for me, it's like a nightmare coming back again, you know, 'cause I know how divide the people were and sort of arguing against each other and fighting against each other. So I think the watch word is we really have to stand together. [46:18] [ Pause ] MAUREEN RUBIN: I wanna throw one other concept into the mix which is technology. We all-- Now, I see Hillary over there so she's gonna--her ears are pricking up. And while we need it, I am very concerned that the students have lost the ability to talk to each other because they don't--two of them would be walking down the street texting each other while they're standing next to each other. The good

11 thing about technology is I don't remember what I was watching last week, but they went inside Google or Facebook, or one of those places and they said that one day a week, they tell the workers, "You don't have to work today on anything we're telling you to work. We want you to use this day to do something wonderful." And they do and that's how a whole bunch of other stuff came about. So I guess my question is, "Are you worried about this generation's over need for technology, their ability to lose?" And they're--i'm wondering whether we're giving them the time to be creative. All of those sort of are what I worry about and so there. [47:46] [ Laughter ] SAY: I'm a bad person to talk about technologies. So I'm hoping with these other two will. I'm sort of technophobic, so. BUCKER: Okay. I'm gonna try this, Maureen, and I have to go to a rehearsal here shortly so I'll just make an exit before you start throwing things. I'm a fine arts dean so, of course, I'm a great advocate for the importance of creativity. But I'm a much, much stronger advocate for the need for discipline as it relates to how we get to being truly creative. And I don't believe we best get there by saying, okay we have this piece of technology or we have this thing, whatever it is. Be creative with it. [48:52] Have any of you even following this story and actually it's a book that's been written by a Chinese mother about the discipline of--that she put in place in raising her children. It's about on the road to being creative and to being a creative problem solver. You must have some disciplinary structure so that you begin to think in terms of ways to solve problems that might be applicable to the situation you're in not just it's a free for all. And don't scream at me about this, but I think one of the places we've really gotten off the track here is we've relaxed the necessary discipline to really get to the point that we can excel in an area and then ultimately to be really creative in that area. [50:10] Or find a way to transfer that creative capacity to some new area. But I would argue that you really, really must have had in your preparation significant discipline to guide you to think sequentially or to know when not to think sequentially on the road to truly being creative. [50:37] [ Pause ] SPECTOR: Is that anything like how do you get to Carnegie Hall practice, practice, practice? [ Inaudible Remark ] BUCKER: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? [ Laughter ] [ Inaudible Remark ] [51:15] SPECTOR: So he's never heard the dean saying anything like that before and he thinks that it's--i've lost it.

12 RIVAS: Can I--I wanna add something just from--i'm actually not on the panel but from an education aspect. And again, it's just to present another side of the coin which I think helps to promote discussion. I think whenever we use the word must that it becomes problematic because--well, for example, in the case of creativity, I don't think necessarily discipline comes before creativity, but the use of creativity creates discipline within you because you like what you're doing and you know what within you how it comes out, and so you end up disciplining yourself as you experience whatever it is that you're gifted to do. [52:14] It's kinda like the person--and again, this is anecdotal evidence because I didn't prepare to speak, but it's like somebody who learns to play the piano on their own. I have a friend who I grew up with and he plays it incorrectly, but he makes beautiful music. And it's because he is creative in that way and he just- -he hits the keys and he's not--he doesn't do it the way he's supposed to. But he taught himself over and over and he knew how to do that and that's what he does. [52:47] I think where we struggle and, again, it's this tension for me, again, a healthy tension because I'm a believer in liberal arts. As a matter of fact, I'm also a believer in things--doing things in order. When I do the laundry at home, I know where my wife's pants are supposed to go. You know, her--the pajama bottoms and the pajama tops, and then the shirts and blouses over here, and I do that. But I've learned in education that people have different strengths in how they express themselves and how they learn to study to their strengths or teach to their strength, and yet I want them all to go through liberal arts education. I do, 'cause I think well-rounded is best. [53:28] But there are some kids who they fail when you force them to take these courses and then they get their ticket to be in the game taken away from them, and they never got to the things that they love and the things that they do well in, and that they would make A s and if we graded them on it but because they couldn't make it through the first things that we forced them to go through. And so again, maybe the tracking system works best in that way. I don't know. But I know that oftentimes when we make must and have to's in there and we try to do that in a blanket way that it becomes problematic at times. And so that's why I called it the healthy tension because--and again, I want you to know that I'm a believer in the liberal arts, the idea of being well-rounded. But I know in my study of how people learn and how they think, and how they become successful that oftentimes it's by playing to their strengths that they do that, and the discipline and all that comes from actually engaging in it and not from being taught that and then applying it, but they actually learn it while they're doing it. But that's just my thought on that. Somebody else had a question, comment. [54:42] OWEN DOONAN: Hi, yes. At the risk of rearing away from such profound and interesting insights, before we got on to this topic, one thing that we were talking about was whether or not it was necessary to eliminate or cut certain kinds of programs that they might be very small in the number of faculty or the number of students and so and so at risk, or they might not be seen temporarily as terribly relevant to economic success on the part of our students. But one of the things that we are fortunate in having here in Los Angeles is an incredibly rich array of sister institutions at all levels of the California Plan. And I was wondering to what extent--is there any thinking about creating partnerships and collaborative relationships that can help us save some of these things that are at risk, so that German isn't defined by, say, taking German 1 and German 2, and then that's it, for anybody who is a CSUN graduate when everybody knows that that really isn't a relevant educational path. I mean if you've taken two semesters of a language, you really can't do anything with it. And so, to what extent is their thinking about

13 working with institutions both CSUs, UCs, and perhaps also the community colleges to create a symbiotic educational pathway? [56:40] SAY: I think there is a lot of conversation going on about this. One of the advantages of being in the CSU is being one campus of the 23 campus system and it gives you opportunity to do things creatively that you couldn't do if you were a single stand-alone campus. And the strategic language initiative is, I think, a very good example of this. There are seven campuses involved, five in the Los Angeles basin, and two up in the Bay Area. Each campus teaches a different language. Students from all CSU campuses and non-csu campuses can participate in this and can attend the courses that are offered through the SLI, and it enables us to offer a range of these strategic languages. We do Russian, Korean, Farsi, Chinese, and Arabic, all critical languages at this point that are offered to CSU students in an intensive fashion that is not usually available to students in the CSU. [57:44] These are usually--when you find this kind of intensive language programs or like at Middlebury and other very kind of elite programs and they're offered to students in the CSU. They've been--we've gotten Federal money to fund them and it's a collaborative. And it happens because the campuses are working together and it has opened up doors for us to think about other ways in which we can collaborate with other regional campuses. We're working right now with Pasadena City College because they have a lower division language program that is a feeder in ours. We were working at ways in which their students can come here and our students can go there so that our students have these opportunities and yet, we're doing it in a way that's more cost effective than how we might have imagined doing it a decade or two ago. And I don't wanna speak to other colleges and programs, and the kinds of things they're doing. But I think you will find that most of the deans on this campus are talking to colleagues at other campuses about how you can do things collaboratively and make it work. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't for all lots of reasons but-- [58:57] [ Inaudible Discussion ] >> I was gonna add just a quick point. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> I didn't hear the--i see it is-- [ Inaudible Remark ] [59:18] SAY: Yeah. We were working with Cal State LA on how we teach freshmen comp and trying to build- -you know, do some work with them so we can share what we learn and improve the programs and without everybody having to reinvent the wheel. I mean there is an advantage having 20--being one of the 23 campus systems. There are lots of smart people out there. And probably somebody has tried something that would be valuable to you and you can figure it out from them. You don't have to redesign the whole thing. [59:49] UNKNOWN FACULTY: I was gonna build on that suggestion about building in creative opportunities. One thing we could maybe think about a little differently is we have all this talent as faculty and that we think of some of the things we would normally do to get students to be more creative

14 and start applying those to ourselves so that maybe we can compete a bit more internationally. So we're, you know, cross disciplinary. If you're teaching one subject and you hit on analytical skills, that maybe you bring in another colleague to help team teach that section. [60:26] SAY: Again, and I only speak from perspective of our college, but we worked quite a bit with colleagues in other departments and other colleges to try to--so for example, the College of Business, is Bill Jennings here? I don't see him. The Dean of Business came to us a few years ago and said, "You know what, we really shouldn't be teaching composition. It's not what we're trained to do. But our students need business comm and they need to know what they're doing, business communication." And so they came to us, they worked with the English department faculty and business faculty in English, sat down, worked it out, developed a whole new curriculum and they--so we now teach business comm for the business college but we've done--we've designed it in a way that meets the needs of the business students. And I think the Dean of Business would tell you they're getting the better experience because people who are trained to teach writing they're actually teaching it. But they didn't have to reinvent it themselves. We figured out a way to do that collaboratively. We worked with folks in the sciences. We've worked with folks in engineering. So that there are ways in which we can work across colleges. The--You know, the sustainability, minor, is housed in the College of Humanities. How odd is that? But there it is. Why? Because we're very good at doing interdisciplinary work and interdisciplinary advising, which is something that the students need and so we could offer than skill set to the minor and house it there in a way that was gonna be functional. [62:06] SPECTOR: I mean, I can certainly do set the freshman level, the way the freshman common reading works. There's a book and it's seen and used across a variety and disciplines or in the freshman connection, learning communities, where faculty from two different departments and often two different colleges are working together to support the success of shared students who enrolled in a pair of classes or sometimes three classes. So that in each class the value of what is going on in the other classes is emphasized and becomes part of the constructional knowledge in the first class and vice versa. [62:48] UNKNOWN FACULTY: Maybe there's a way to share that out more but also share it with the part time faculty that tend not to be on campus as much and network as much. It's a thought to build on the success that the people have had. Things to strategize about. [ Inaudible Discussion ] [63:08] SAY: Well, he's walking over. Can I add? I think one of the things that we do pretty good on this campus, and I think better than a lot of our sister campuses, is we do work across colleges. And I think having been working on WASC now for several years and have these conversations, I think one of the reasons we're better at it is sort of the aftermath of the '94 earthquake when we had to figure out how to make this place keep functioning when everything had fallen down. And so we started talking to people outside of our own little domains. And that's a legacy of the earthquake that I think continues to this day is the working across colleges and departments in ways that I don't think happens all the time. [63:56] SPECTOR: And, Sue, if you were suggesting that the Common Reading Program or the Freshman Connection Programs need to reach more people so that people understand that. Is that what you were saying that they're here? [ Inaudible Remark ]